WEEKEND WARRIOR

A rare episode of triathlon unfair play sees Brunty drop the humour…

I must apologise in advance to all of you who have turned to this page in search of the thinly veiled knob-gags that you’ve come to expect, but I’m afraid this column isn’t funny…

The other week I took part in a race. The run section involved three laps of a hilly, circular-ish course around parkland, and despite setting off like a herd of turtles, I knew I was fairly well up the field with nobody breathing down my neck.

I reached the start of the second lap having been overtaken by just one person (and he’s one of my mates, the git) and I was surprised to find both he and I overtaking another competitor. It’s hard to explain why this should have surprised me, but I knew this wasn’t someone who had been ahead of me, and it wasn’t on a part of the course where I’d have expected to lap anyone.

I can’t explain why, it just felt wrong, and I spent the next few minutes trying to work it out. But you know what it’s like when you’re running. Your brain can’t cope with deep thought so I just forgot about it and concentrated on the fact that my knees were making a noise like a goat eating celery.

Lap three soon (well, not that soon) came around, by which time

I was running like the winded, but my grumpy concentration was disturbed by the sight of the same person I’d passed on lap two ahead of me again, running along in almost exactly the same place. I passed them a second time and had a good look to make sure it was the same person. It was. By now I was not only baffled but cross, because I couldn’t work out how they could be on the part of the course we were on. I was going well, but not so well as to take a whole lap out of someone.

By now you’ve probably worked out where this is going, so I’ll move to the finish. I crossed the line inside the top 10 (okay, one humble-brag) and began my usual post-race ritual of sitting down on the first available surface and then making a series of sound effects as I tried to get back up. I hadn’t even had time to complete this manoeuvre when the next finisher came over the line – and it was the person I’d passed twice.

Before I’d had time to take this in, he was surrounded by friends/ family praising his efforts. By now I was growing dangerous but was conscious that I had absolutely no evidence to back up my suspicion that he had somehow lopped a big section off the course, so rather than make a scene I waited until he was gathering kit then walked up and quizzed him on how I’d managed to pass him twice. He blustered some evasive flannel involving toilet stop, taking a wrong turn but going back the right way, none of which made any sense, before moving quickly away. It was then that I did something I’d never done before in 20 years of racing – I reported another athlete to the race organisers for cheating.

I have to say the race organiser was excellent. They dealt with it quickly and thoroughly, speaking to me and to another athlete who also had concerns. They checked timings, satellite map and they took action – and that’s all I’m going to say on that. No names, no pack drill.

However, when someone does something like this, there are always after-effects. One is that I felt guilty about reporting them. ‘No one likes a grass’ as the saying goes, and I genuinely felt bad about turning informer, plus giving the extremely nice race organiser a problem. More importantly, some of the people who finished behind him were robbed of a top-10 finish at the time. That they were subsequently promoted up the rankings is cold comfort when you’ve missed out on the moment.

So, there’s my tale. I told you it wasn’t funny. Mercifully this kind of thing is extremely rare and in the hundreds of races I’ve done, I’ve never encountered it before. I hope I never encounter it again. It leaves a nasty taste and, despite my own efforts in the race, I’ll always remember it as the one where the bloke cheated.

“I genuinely felt bad about turning informer, after all, no one likes a grass”